He blinks. A slow blink. Lethal.
“Speculation,” Niles says. He appears at my elbow, calm and disinterested. “Not the first time she’s spouted random shit.”
“Perhaps.” The Prime leans away and takes his hand with him. I can still feel Niles’s fingers. “We’ll soon see.”
“Shall I take her to the mapping center?” Niles asks.
The words shred all the bits of me still intact. There weren’t many. I scan the space, but there’s nowhere to run. Plus the flunkies in back have their dosers out.
“No, to holding,” says the Prime. “We have to get the power on first.”
“Hell no.” I step away from their happy little family, nod at the silent Shadow/techie waiting in back. “You can send me with him.”
The Prime’s smile could gut a planet. “And what makes you think you have a say?”
The streethover’s rear doors have no interior handles. My seat has no cushion, a curved silver bench built into an enclosed pillbox that’s empty but for me.
And Niles, beyond the partition window that separates my mobile prison from the hover’s front seat. He steers us through the dead city. Skytowers loom in shadows, black-toothed gaps against the smoke-black sky. The haze saves the sky from being pitch, but not by much. There’s no light to reflect.
The city is different. Haunted. No flashing ad-screens, no streetlights or bright shopfronts. Some of the cloudsuite towers glow blue in peppered windows, but even those are dim. We could almost be underwater, in one of the Outer Brink’s black seas.
Seas that soon won’t exist once the fuel extraction begins.
At least the Brinkers have nothing to hold over my head anymore. Niles is the Prime’s son. They couldn’t kill him if they tried.
And once word of my mapping hits their radar, Dee and Dad will be safe, too. There won’t be enough left of me to make the Brinker’s broadcast happen.
Niles catches my eye in the skinny mirror that reflects the street behind. I look away.
“The whole planet’s down,” he says, and the silence jumps. “There are riots in East 5th.”
Not surprising.
I stare out the window.
“You were suicidal,” says Niles.
My eyes snap to the mirror. He watches, hair soft in the interior’s glow. Haloed.
“Holding” must be on the other side of the damn planet. We’re going to wreck if Niles doesn’t keep his eyes on the street.
“Wesfen said he had to break cover to keep you from jumping, which meant one less eye on you.”
So the power technician has a name.
I return to the window.
“Most of Dad’s people are tied up with the Heir search. I was bred for infiltration, and Dad thought you could use a personal touch.” He sounds different now. There’s culture to his cadence. It’s nice. I hate it. “Especially after he brought up the mapping and you laughed at him. The damn Prime. Met his eyes and just . . .” Niles shakes his head. “That was the second time I saw you.”
He can shut up anytime.
“Dad thinks you’re the key to Oen’s virus, so we had to keep you intact.”
Yeah, and mapping won’t screw with that at all.
Niles must read my brain. “The mapping is my fault. It’s too risky and Dad wouldn’t have used it, but I sold him on the bracelet—that you believed it was the key. And since it’s not . . . we have to search your subconscious for answers.”
So my being fried up as a slimy vegetable is on him, too. Fantastic.
I hope the Prime is right, that Mom has a project. A reason.
I hope the virus destroys them all.
The streethover slows. The darkened city gets darker, and we enter some kind of building. Warehouse maybe? Walls and ceiling swallowing the hover as its forward beams outline a world of pavement and dust.
We jerk to a stop, engine still humming as Niles turns in his seat. We face each other through the partition window.
“Aren’t you going to chew me out?” he asks. “Haul my ass over the carpet? Don’t you have anything to say?”
“To you?” Flat. Nothing.
I will be nothing, if they map me.
But the power’s still out, the city still dark, and they haven’t mapped me yet.
Niles closes his eyes, forehead thudding into the window. He doesn’t seem to care.
If my door had a handle, I’d be gone. I search the dark for something to see.
“If you could do anything,” Niles asks, softer now, “go anywhere, had no ties, what would you do?”
“Other than break your neck?”
He flinches, but nods.
I’d go home and raid Mrs. Divs’s cookie jar.
Except that’d land me with a treacherous Accountant and singer of lullabies who locked me out. The cookies are probably poisoned.
I link my hands behind my head and stare into the hover’s ceiling.
“I’d go eat pastries in Westlet,” I say, “visit all their city bake shops, start my own travel show.” I smile into his tight, wary face. “After I destroyed Galton, of course. Every last piece. I am my mother’s daughter.”